Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

Both sides in the historic controversy over President Trump’s policy of imposing charges on goods coming into the U.S. from around the world have urged the Supreme Court to act with unusual speed to decide the dispute. By agreement, government lawyers and those for challengers to the tariffs asked the Court to agree within one… Read More

The Supreme Court apparently is going to have the last word on the legality of President Trump’s wide-ranging tariffs on imported goods, but getting there could put the Court between two legal theories that it applies these days. One theory – favorable to Trump – is the current Court majority’s generous support of presidential power… Read More

A power that President Trump fondly embraces and uses in sweeping and unprecedented ways – setting import charges on goods coming into the U.S. from nearly the whole world – does not exist, a federal appeals court ruled Friday in a historic defeat for his policy. Only Congress has that power under the Constitution, the… Read More

A state court in New York, issuing 323 pages of a dizzying array of conflicting legal and factual findings plus a patched-together final compromise, ruled on Thursday that President Trump, his family and his business firm should not have to pay nearly a half-billion-dollars in penalty for years of rampant business fraud. The ruling, though,… Read More

The Supreme Court has just given itself a truly historic test: is it ready to take away much of the protection that federal law has long provided for racial minorities’ right to vote, because that is no longer needed? At the center of two orders the Justices have issued in recent days is the future… Read More

In a new and more revealing sign that the Supreme Court is on the verge of allowing President Trump to put partisan loyalists in all policy making posts in the federal Executive Branch, the Court on Wednesday gave him permission to fire three members of a half-century old consumer protection agency. The Court has done… Read More

Addinto the loss of women’s reproductive health choices, the last potential for constitutional protection failed in a federal court decision yesterday.  If that ruling holds after higher court review, any right to abortion may be gone.  Only Congress would still have power to provide nationwide protection – an unlikely prospect. The new ruling by a federal… Read More

Continuing to allow President Trump to take sweeping steps to shutter federal government functions, the Supreme Court on Monday permitted the firing of half of the staff of the U.S. Department of Education and other moves toward its total shutdown – without permission from Congress. Though the Court acted only temporarily, the completely unexplained order… Read More

Making a new test of courts’ power to block President Trump’s actions, a federal trial judge in New Hampshire on Thursday issued a sweeping order to protect the constitutional right of newborn babies to U.S. citizenship. U.S. District Judge Joseph N. LaPlante of Concord issued the order while reaching a new decision that Trump’s attempted… Read More

One of the Constitution’s most direct commands to the President is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”  And that simply means, two law professors once wrote, that a President’s “defiance [of a law] cannot be considered faithful execution.” But a law that Congress passed last year by large majorities, that has been… Read More